


Curiosity

by Heliopause



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Cricket, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-08
Updated: 2013-12-08
Packaged: 2018-01-04 00:13:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1074716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heliopause/pseuds/Heliopause
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clara meets the Doctor twice and saves him once, in a different place and time entirely.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Curiosity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VampirePaladin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VampirePaladin/gifts).



> This story is for sirvalkyrie/VampirePaladin, who requested a story with Clara and the Fifth Doctor. It plays with cross-referencing three episodes of Doctor Who: 'Black Orchid', 'The Arc of Infinity' and 'The Name of the Doctor' - and is almost canonical, since there is a brief glimpse in 'The Name of the Doctor', of a scene from 'The Arc of Infinity'. :D  
> Many thanks to VampirePaladin, for her generosity to the Typhoon Haiyan appeal, and to Waltzmatildah, for her wonderful running of Fandomaid.  
> Some cricket terms are explained at the end of the story.

** Curiosity  **

 

[](http://imgur.com/U0bPd6t)

  
**I - After the Matrix**  
   
After it was over, Nyssa began to analyse it all, with her usual precise and scientific curiosity.  
   
"What was it like, in the Matrix?" she asked the Doctor.   
   
He shifted uncomfortably under her calm gaze.  
  
"It was... strange.  Ask Tegan—she was there."  
   
"Don't ask _me_ to talk about it!  It was _horrible!_   It was like being dead."  
   
"Logically..." began Nyssa.   
   
"Logical or not, Nyssa," the Doctor interrupted, "it's closer than you think.  Omega was holding the last shreds of my life-force in existence. My mind and my body had been ripped apart.  In the Matrix there was consciousness, but not _life._ Being there _was_ a kind of death."  
   
"I told you!" Tegan said to Nyssa, but the princess of Traken was still looking closely at the Doctor.  
   
"So...if you hadn't been able to persuade Omega to reunite you..."  
   
"Yes.  If I hadn't agreed to listen to him... Or if I _had_ agreed, but if I hadn't been given the numeric lock for the computer room, we would never have got away in time to prevent the destruction of all things..."  
   
" _Been given?_ You said that was by  luck!"  
   
"Did I?" he asked, with a bland, bright smile, then turned and began to busy himself with the TARDIS controls.   
   
"He keeps too much to himself," she hissed to Tegan. "Scientists should share all knowledge."  
   
Tegan laughed. "If you ask _me_ , we're probably better off not knowing!"  
   
The Doctor kept his back to them. Tegan and Nyssa.  Nyssa and Tegan.  The cool, clear-minded princess of Traken, the indomitable, sharp-tongued Australian—both so familiar, both so valued and both so much a part of his life.  But the girl he was remembering now—that was a different girl, a strange and intriguing and impossible girl: the girl from Cranleigh Hall. 

  
   
 **II - A song in sunlight**  
   
The afternoon had been (just for once!) a pure pleasure, the fresh air riffling in his hair, the brilliance of the day and the scent of newly-mown sun-warmed grass, and the cheerful, eager courtesy of the welcome at the Cranleigh Cricket Club.  
   
He had kitted himself out, put on the big batsman's pads and grasped his bat ( _beautiful bat, he'd thought absently, with a nice solid weight to it_ ).  Nyssa and Aldric, he saw, were resignedly preparing themselves to endure one more totally _illogical_ Earth activity.  _What a very silly activity,_ Nyssa had said about the wonderful old Earth trains—well, she would find a game of cricket even harder to understand!  But Tegan, at least, was brimful of interest and anticipation.  The Doctor grinned and flourished his bat at her confidently, turned and strode to the crease.  
   
The bowler, standing some fifty yards off, ready to begin his run towards the cricket pitch, was eyeing him warily, eyes half-closed against the sun.   
   
"Play on!" called the umpire, and the Doctor stood ready as the bowler took a short hop-step and launched into his run-up, came thundering down towards the pitch, one long sinewy arm rolling up and over, and let fly the ball.  With all the joy of the golden afternoon sun pulsing through him, the Doctor hit out, and the ball soared up, up into the blue and endless sky...  
   
"Oh, nicely played, sir!" came in Lord Cranleigh's voice, and "Well struck, Doctor!" from Tegan, but behind them both, and somehow turning them both into just background noise, another voice rang out—a laughing, urgent, infinitely expressive voice, crying:  
   
"Now, _run_ , you clever boy!  _Run!_ "  
   
It was a voice as clear as a bird's and it lifted him like a song, and his heart sang in response even as he darted down the pitch, touched his bat to the ground, and back and down and back again.   
   
 _Four_. He had taken a four from the first ball, from the next he took a five, then another five, as he gradually settled into the batting...   
   
" _Four, five, five_ ," the same voice called, encouragingly, and then oddly, " _Remember!_ "  
   
He looked around at the end of the over.  The spectators spattered applause, and he grinned at them absently, his eyes scanning to try to see which of them owned that voice.  A girl's voice, or a young woman's voice, but not Nyssa's, not Tegan's.  Then...whose?  
   
He could not see, in that quick survey, anyone who seemed a match for the voice, but still, all that long innings, as his partners came and went, and he batted on, and the score rose steadily, he _knew_ she was there, somewhere...  
   
And finally—his score was reaching unmatchable heights, and the total was 391—Cranleigh declared, the other team went in to bat, and he was called to bowl.  
   
He used the few minutes, waiting for the opposing team's batsmen to walk to the pitch, to survey the crowd.  There weren't many spectators, and only one woman other than Tegan and Nyssa was young enough to match that voice—a girl standing back, and to one side of the pavilion.  But the voice he had heard had been lilting, vivid and alive, and this girl seemed—he craned to see—restrained, colourless.  Was that a uniform she was wearing?  A dull blue shirt, an oddly studded grey leather jacket—curiously militaristic clothing for 1925.  Was she perhaps a kind of warden, or even a nanny, he wondered?  Though there were no children about—and maybe this was not the girl at all.  
   
He shrugged, trying to quell his curiosity; the opposing batsmen were at the crease, and he needed to give his mind to the bowling.  But it was not easy to concentrate, when somewhere in the little crowd was the solution to the mystery of a girl with a voice like a song.  Their opening batsman—their best, he supposed—took six runs from him, and then five.  He was conscious of a vague disappointment with himself, or rather was vaguely conscious that he might be disappointing _her_.  And then the same voice rang across the field:  
   
" _Six,_ _five_... Come _on,_ Doctor!  You can do it.  _Run!_ "  
   
Her voice seemed to turn the quiet village pastime inside out, and the humdrum became something amazing and glorious—his spirit lifted in response, and he _could_ , he _knew_ he could, play this sport as it had never been played before.  
   
 _Sport?_   No, it was _art_ , it was shining, revelatory _science_ , making all things clear.  A mystical, glorious dance of Time Lords across Time, and now, _now_ was his moment.   
   
And in that piercing understanding, he started his run—first a slow lope, then with increasing speed, hurtling towards the pitch, to swing his arm _up_ and _around_ and then releasing the ball at the precise and only moment in the history of time for it to drive, spinning on its axis like a hurtling star, straight to the toes of the mesmerised batsman, who poked his bat feebly out, and then stood, dazed, amid the scattered bails.   
   
 _Out._  
   
"Oh, well bowled!" came, in Tegan's voice, but " _Clever_ boy!" rang out an instant after, and he felt absurdly pleased—with the day, with himself, and with the unknown girl behind the voice.  
   
And again _Out_ , and again, _Out_ , and in the end the last nine batsmen were all out for two.  As the teams broke for tea, the Doctor knew he was finally and completely that rarest thing in all the universes: a happy man.  Everything on this golden day was well with the world except...  
   
Except he needed to find that girl.  
   
And wonderfully and magically, there she was, standing behind a table—some sort of refreshments stand, apparently—beside the pavilion.  She still wore the severe grey and blue, and her hair was sleek and primly caught up, but now that he was close he saw that her eyes held the same lilting challenge which had sounded in her voice.   
   
"Refreshments?" she said, as if the word was a dare.   
   
He looked down at the plate she held, and looked again.  An arc of identically precise geometric shapes, like a perfectly deconstructed five-dimensional hypersphere, glowing and golden, fanned across the plate, infinity disassembled.  But how could any human in this period even know what a 5D-hypersphere...?  
   
"Are you looking for something?"  
   
Yes.  Though he couldn't find in his mind just what it was that he had been looking for.  
   
"Just looking to see..."  She was watching him intently and expectantly.  He changed his mind, deciding to ask her directly. "How is it possible that you know how to segment a five-dimen...?"  
   
"It's just plain cut-up oranges, I'm afraid," she said, cutting across his question.  "Of course, I'd rather be offering something more exciting. An orange soufflé.  I love making soufflés..." She leaned towards him, confidingly.  "Light as air, and so _orangey_..."  
   
Yes.  For no good reason that sounded wonderfully _right_ , and she was wonderfully close and her eyes were shining, and her breath was almost imperceptibly whispering against his cheek.  He leaned across, and...  
   
"Oranges?  Splendid!" came the voice of Lord Cranleigh.  "And I say, ripping performance, old boy. Come over to the house and meet the mater."  
   
His host was affable, congratulatory, and a most unwelcome interruption.  When the Doctor had finished receiving the praise for his performance on the field, he looked back to where she had been, but the impossible girl had vanished.   
   
There was no help for it.  He agreed to join the kindly—but very, very dull—Cranleigh family at the Hall for what would surely be, he thought, a very uneventful evening.  
   
   
 **III - A whisper in the dark**  
   
"Why do I always let my curiosity get the better of me?" the Doctor lamented. But he always did, and he had again, and now he was trapped in a dark and secret passage at Cranleigh Hall.  
   
True, he was right at this moment standing where a ray of brightness streamed down, but like the one he had found close to the entrance when he had come in it had led nowhere, and there was nothing to do except, apparently, to go back to feeling his way step by step through the interminable darkness.  
   
Another turning... another.... his fingers trailed along the stone walls.  There would be a way out, eventually, he told himself. All he had to do was keep looking.  
   
Still, he felt a slight exasperation.  It was his own doing, his own willingness to be swept up by the Cranleighs to attend their fund-raising ball, which had brought him to this.  
   
"Why didn't I leave after the cricket?" he muttered to himself.  
   
It would have been the sensible thing to do.  None of them had wanted another Earth sojourn so soon, and though the afternoon had been enjoyable there was no real reason to stay longer.  But he hadn't done the sensible thing.  He had stayed for this fancy-dress ball, yet another _very silly activity_.   
   
And for what? If he couldn't find her again in the broad daylight of the cricket ground, then what chance would he have had, even if he did find the way...  
   
He was suddenly still, all his senses alert.  There had been a rustling in the dark.  
   
"Who's there?"  
   
Against his will, he was whispering.  Something about the dark and the silence and the clammy air forced his voice down until it was no more than a breath.   
   
Again the rustling noise, and then a breath of air against his cheek, and then he knew, even without light he knew.  
   
"Come back this way, to the light," she said, and a slim hand clutched at his wrist, and drew him back the way he had come.   
   
Of course it was the girl, though she had changed. Her hair was no longer meticulously neat, but a tumble of dark curls onto nearly-bare shoulders; she no longer wore the prim grey and blue, but flouncing claret-coloured silk, a dress close-curving to her torso and then cascading in ruffles to the shadowy floor.  Not a dress of 1925—she looked more like some particularly self-confident Victorian working girl.  Which of course meant...  
   
"You're in costume for the ball already?"  
   
She looked down at her dress, as if surprised.  
   
"I seem to be!  What ball is that, then?"  
   
"For the children.  Lord Cranleigh holds it every year in aid of the hospital for sick children."  
   
"For children.  Yes, I'll always be there for the children.  _Here_ for the children.  Here _and_ there.  Anyway, you're pretty much the same, aren't you? Always there for children in need?"   
   
Maybe his face showed his perplexity, because she dropped the subject of children, and fired another question at him, like a challenge.   
   
"Why are _you_ here?  Are you looking for something?"  
   
The same question, but now he knew the answer.  He replied cheerfully:   
   
"As it happens, yes.  The way out. You don't happen to have seen the way out, do you?  If you got in, you must know how to get out."  
   
" _That's_ not logical.  _You_ got in, and you don't know how to get out.  I expect it won't be the last time either."  
   
He brushed that aside.  
   
"Probably. But right now I want to know how to get out myself out of here."  
   
She rustled closer, her silk skirts whispering in the dark, and breathed again, close to him.  
   
"Well, I shall show you!  But first, I want to talk about how to get _them_ out of _there..."_    
   
" _Them?_ "  
   
"Them.  First, how to get _them_ out of there, then how to get _you_ out of there, then how to get you out of here... bargain?"  
   
And once again—curiosity got the better of him; what exactly did this strange girl have to say?   
   
"Yes.  Bargain."  
   
"Clever boy!  Now...listen: think how you got them out in the cricket.  Think of the scores!... _four, five, five_..."  
   
"That was only on the first three balls," he corrected. "Our total was three nine one."  
   
"Yes.  Four, five, five, three, nine, one.  And what else?"  
   
His brow wrinkled in concentration.  "They got a six, a five.  Then I got the last nine out for two."  
   
"Yes!" she seemed delighted. "And _that's_ how you get them out."  
   
Bewildering.  Intriguing.  "Them? I want to get _myself_ out!"  
   
"Well, if you ever want to get someone else out... you know the numbers! All you have to do is remember."  
   
"All right then... how do I get my _self_ out?"  
   
"Oh, that's easy. You just have to be ready to listen. To listen and talk"  
   
"We _are_ talking."  
   
She laughed and moved a little closer.  "So we are!"   
   
He thought he saw her eyes glinting in the darkness, and he wasn't even sure that he really wanted to get out, or at any rate not to get out too soon.  But he had to know: "How is talking going to get me out of here?"  
   
"Oh, not out of _here!_   Out of _there_!  If you're trapped _there_ , then to get out, you'll have be ready to listen."  
   
"Ready to listen.  Got it."   He didn't get it.   
   
But it was a pleasure, even here in this dank, gloomy passage, to be deep in conversation with her—and why worry about how to get out of some unknown _there_ in the future, when the present moment _here_ was so intriguing?  
   
"You're not listening now," she scolded.  "Remember—the numbers, to get _them_ out of there, and just be ready to listen, even to an enemy, to get _you_ out of there. "  
   
"I'll remember, though I have no idea where _there_ is.  But who are you?  Are you from here?"  
 

A short laugh in the darkness; he could not tell if it was in delight or amusement.

  
"Oh, _yes!_   From here!  And there.  I'm from a lot of places.  But now it's time to get you out of this...."  
   
"No...waitwaitwaitwait...you're...."  
   
"Ordinary.  Human.  Come on!"   
   
She caught at his arm again, and began to pull him insistently, hurrying him along the dim passageway.  
   
"No, wait!  I want to get to know you better.  Who are you?"  
   
"There's plenty of time for that!  I promise we'll meet again.  We haven't even met _first_ yet!"  
   
She was a time-traveller, he realised.  Only a time-traveller would say that.  
   
"But we're _going_ to meet?  Our first meeting is still ahead?"  
   
"Yes! But not now!  And... _remember!_ "   
   
"So long as we meet eventually."  And he was suddenly utterly confident that they _would_ meet, buoyed up again by that inexplicable feeling of things being in total harmony; everything was _right_ with the world.  
   
But now came another whispering and rustling of her silk skirts, and he knew, ruefully, that for _this_ time, right now, she was leaving; she must have brought him to the exit from the passage, and now she was moving away, leaving him there.  
   
"So long as we meet eventually," he murmured into the darkness, though he guessed she had already gone wherever she was going.  "So long as we meet at last."  
   
And, wondering very much about it all, he leaned against the stone wall, and it opened, releasing him from the secret passage.  
   
   
 **IV - Remembering - in the Matrix**  
   
He had forgotten all about that whole encounter, first in the horror and sorrow that had followed at Cranleigh Hall, and then in the devastation of the Earthshock.  
   
Forgotten it, until the words of an unknown enemy had triggered the memory again.  He had been alone, adrift in the terrible infinity of the Matrix, in brightness beyond sight, and in clanging silence beyond hearing. No sight, no senses at all, but still there was awareness, and the awareness was of the enemy's cold pronouncement: "We shall talk when you are ready to listen."  
   
He had _not_ been ready; he had chosen instead to protect Gallifrey by his silence, his refusal to hear his enemy.  It was the only choice a Time Lord could make, he had thought, to accept the timeless pain of being trapped in the Matrix, rather than...  
   
And that was when he seemed to be aware of her again, as if she was again a spectator—though this time of his pain, not of a joyous afternoon's sport—and her words had sprung back, alive and vibrant to his mind:  _If you're trapped there, then to get out, you'll have be ready to listen._    
   
It didn't make sense, to listen to this enemy, who threatened all Gallifrey, and worse, but then nothing about her had made sense.  And more... that feeling that _everything was right_ with the world had been back with him again, even there, as he drifted timelessly, unliving, in the crushing clarity of the Matrix.  And so he had called to the enemy, to the emptiness, "All right, let's talk!  Do you hear me?"  
   
And then the rest had followed, unfolding inevitably to the melancholy, necessary end.   
   
***  
   
"If you were  given the numbers," Nyssa was persisting, still a little indignant that he had not told her everything, "then luck wasn't involved at all!"  
   
His smile broadened to a grin, as he deftly re-set the controls of the TARDIS.  
   
"Oh, it was _definitely_ luck—from the most brilliantly lucky day of my life!  Luck, and curiosity."  
 

**~o~o~o~**

   
   
A few cricketing terms:  
 **wicket:** the arrangement of wooden posts ('stumps') defended by the batsman  
 **bails:** the small wooden pegs on top of the stumps of the wicket  
 **crease:** the line which marks where the batsman stands, in front of the wicket.  
 **the pitch:** the twenty-two yard length between the two creases, along which the batsmen make their runs  
 **declaring:** when playing time is limited, and one team has achieved a good score, but the batsmen are still not all out, the batting team will 'declare', so that they will have time to bowl out the other team, thus avoiding a draw.


End file.
